All the rest of it as well goes along with that. You do not behave it a manner that benefits or is considerate of others any longer unless you are a sucker or a schmuck. Seriously, no one else is out there making the world any better for you. You don't owe anybody else a thing. Get your's. Get it any way you can, buy some property, go skiing. The rest of the world, collectively, and individually, can go kill itself. 

People today better themselves constantly. Fitness centers stay open 24 hours a day. College enrollment is not suffering. Wealth is hard fought for and readily available to those in the right positions. House flipping is taking place all around us. Healthy eating. Bicycling. People aren't that lazy, really. They're willing to work at these opportunities for self-improvement.

But the reasons they're out there doing these things is not to make the world a better place. If you think you can, you're kind of crazy, in the general opinion. If so, more power to you. Go save the whales. Go hug a rainforest. Good for you. If nothing else, you'll be getting the hell out of my way...

Heroes today who represent backwards, idiotic concepts such as altruism, selflessness, or Mankind fly in the face of what people today realize life is really all about; Kicking others in the teeth, purely in self-defense, because they were coming at you. They were just too damn slow to get in that all-important first shot. They had it coming, all right? It's called "Competition," and it's healthy. As long as you're not competing with me.

Heroes, or at least marketable, pop-culture entities serving as wish-fulfillment stand-ins, had better have something better going for them than happy thoughts and their heart on their sleeve. The fight has to be personal. They have to be willing to take it the edge and beyond. They have to be extreme. They have to be bad-ass.

Why? Because that's what the whole "I wish I were that person" thing is about today.

Somewhere along the line, Reed fell off the "person you want to be like" list and became a Complicated Character, someone Worthy of today's much, much, much better writers' attentions. The Hero who was all things to all people was deemed silly. What is interesting about the guy for today's audiences? What do we know about him? We know he spends too much time in the lab. We know Sue has to remind him to spend more time with his son. Well, there y'go! Right there! The guy's an asshole! A bad dad! THAT's what we can hang our hat on! Plus, he thinks he's all that and a bag of puppies! He's arrogant! Distant! Out of touch! You know who he is... He's Professor X! He's the Chief! He's someone who thinks he knows better than you do how to run your life! Guys like that... are the enemy. At least in fiction. In real life, in your middle management job, guys who fight guys like that are the enemy. They're insubordinate and should be fired. Just keep counting their mistakes. Everybody makes them. Just keep count. Meanwhile, back in the fictional world, Reed totally needs, as they once said on Buffy, "every square inch of his ass kicked." And Reed's ass can get pretty big, square-inch wise...

Rather than simply investigating where the book really did originate, Claremont's Reed begins questioning himself. Sure, he doesn't remember writing it, but that doesn't mean he didn't... What if he did write it? Did he mean to turn Ben into a monster? Were Sue and Johnny's lives really that meaningless to him? How can he ever know? Who is he really?

Reed dissolves into a thumb-sucking, self-doubting loser. See also: Cyclops. He can't save Kitty from the condition that's killing her. He's can't save anyone. What if he tries to kill her? Or turn her into a frog for dissection? What if he really is a bad, bad mans...? Sob, blubber, blubber, sob...

Sue steps up. She knows her man. She knows the book's a fake. No doubts. No question. She's an angry mama lion defending her family and cubs as she tells Doom, the diary's true author, as he's... eating a caviar-covered cracker... at a party of some sort... Then she turns on her heel and smartly saunters off... Because the book's writing sucked on levels that cannot possibly be conveyed in mere words... The actual color-change in the face that accompanies the induced nausea as the events are recapped has to factor in, somehow...

In any case, not many authors followed Claremont's lead on the self-conflicted thumbsucker version of Reed, but it did raise a lot of previously-kept-to-fandom questions about what Reed knew and when did he know it.